As noted by Claire Brotherton in her round up of Day 2, Sunday morning seemed sparsely attended, the announcement that the previous night’s social was a record bar taking for a UK Wordcamp presumably no coincidence.

Despite a brisk and enjoyable late-night walk home, I confess I was one of those lunching out the morning, so I missed Petra Foster on how to Be a Brand, Not a Commodity (although I’d caught this presentation at the previous month’s WP Brum meetup) and Pauline Roche and Ted Ryan on WordPress for Small and Not For Profit Enterprises.

WordCamp Birmingham (UK) 2015 happened last weekend, and seems to have been a great success for all concerned, putting the Birmingham WordPress community in, if you’ll excuse the pun, bullish mood. I certainly enjoyed myself. The event reignited my passion for WordPress and web-work in general, answering a few questions, confirming a few biases and giving me new energy and contacts. For anyone involved in WordPress, whether as a developer, designer, site manager or content creator, I would heartily recommend getting along to your nearest WordCamp. They tend to cater for all tastes and areas of this kind of work, and, as with most conferences and meet-ups, the most interesting conversations occur at the margins outside the programmed content.

But that’s another story. I thought here I’d gather all of the most relevant online stuff I can find from the event: slides of the talks, comments from myself on those talks I attended, comments and a sense of the buzz from others, as well as some of the photos available online. This will be a multi-part post, and in this one I’ll focus on day one.Continue reading WordCamp Brum Roundup – Saturday→

Originally designed as a blogging platform, WordPress has become widely used as a content management system (CMS) for the web.

You may have automated installation of popular web applications, including WordPress, available through your webhost – Fantastico and Scriptaculous are common examples of these services. I recommend not using these, for two main reasons.

Security – the default settings of the automated installer will be known and exploitable

You won’t learn as much as you will be choosing to manually install.

So installing manually brings the benefit of empowerment, and with WordPress, the manual procedure’s well documented: just refer to the first port of call for WordPress, the documentation, known as the ‘codex’.